Should we take Corbyn’s new party seriously?
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (with others) is starting a new politically left party here in the UK. There have been various opinions from a good thing to splitting the left vote and allowing Reform to win the next election. It is very early but they are already touted as the Reform of the left. Will it have an effect, be damp squib or something in between?
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The negative effect, as you say @Hugal is that it might split the leftwing vote and allow Reform to gain more seats.
Labour has 'form' on this I'm afraid.
This
The Greens don't work as a left-wing opposition, because they have a significant number of misanthropic eco-fascists and other forms of rightwing extremist. The Lib Dems don't because they are supporters of the kind of capitalism which is ruining the world moment by moment.
It seems to me that the new party is needed, but very risky. It won't be allowed to succeed, of course, and may end up doing significant harm, but a political system without it is fundamentally distorted. Of course, our political system is fundamentally distorted, but this needs to be visible. Unmistakable, even....
I'd agree with most of that with the following additions;
I'm sceptical that the Greens can be a suitable vehicle for a left politics, but equally enough people seem to be convinced that they can be that it's an idea that's going to be tested, and it'll be interesting to see what happens should Polanski win.
In terms of the threat to Reform; an 'us or the fascists' pitch, doesn't have a good record (and Starmer's approval ratings are way below Bidens), and at the end of the day, if not now, then when?
Finally, there may be minor changes to the electoral system, automatic enrolment - should it go ahead - would be a larger change than extending the franchise, and may have some side effects in terms of the composition of some constituencies.
I say this as an occasional Green voter that moved there from the right (though not the Right).
There is a green strand that descends from acolytes of Mosley (ie Jorian Jenks, and via him people like Rolf Gardiner and Henry Williamson).
There is an agrarian blood and soil nationalist strain bubbling below the surface which is currently diluted by Corbynites looking for a home. But for a party ideologically opposed to for example fox hunting, let’s just say I know multiple hardcore fox hunting Green Party voters, who are sold on the ecology, but from the Right.
Agrarian nationalists don’t really have a home in the current British party landscape, but some of them are committed Greens.
No idea if that’s what @ThunderBunk was getting at, but it’s my experience. They’re a leftwing party, almost overwhelming so, but with a very odd Hard Right faction of fellow travellers.
There are many who believe Corbyn was the subject of a witch hunt. Certainly when he got into power Starmer denied saying he was Corbyn’s friend when there are internet posts showing him saying the opposite. I think he has a chance of disrupting things. Good or bad I am unsure.
Especially here in Wales where we have a tired Labour Government with a tiny majority, upsurgent Plaid Cymru and Reform parties, and a Senedd election - decided in a new "closed proportional" voting system - next May.
The Canadian Greens, while generally led by fairly credible(if goofy) people, have attracted candidates who definitely slant crackpot. Some of them got the boot for expressing antisemitic conspiracy views.
(Though I think some of these cranks, unlike British mosleyites, might not be politically sophisticated enough to understand the nature of the ideologies they were espousing.)
It s hard to characterise the Canadian Greens. They seem to range from dedicated intellectuals to benignly bonkers - there is little that is cohesive or threatening about them.
In his essay on antisemitism(*), Orwell describes an antisemitic acquaintance of his as "left-wing, in an undirected fashion".
I think the Canadian Greens attract a lot of people like that, who have a vague idea that politicians are "all a buncha crooks who are just tryin' to help out the fat cats", without really distinguishing how the various parties differ in the way they respectively do that, and the differences in degree between right and left etc.
And examining where all those people have ended up in terms of who they see as "the fat cats" is like looking at a dropped hand of pick-up sticks. Some stick with the rich qua the rich, some blame politicians qua politicians, some blame "bureaucrats" etc. And while very few of them would consciously embrace formal racism, a lot of them would mindlessly latch onto movements that do, on their way into the Green Party.
Colby Cosh, a right-libertarian journalist in Canada, once conceptualized Greens as "left-wingers who are hostile to unions", and while I think that might put the cart before the horse(**), I think there might be a deeper truth to it.
(*) The exact topic of the essay is not directly relevant here, I just liked the descriptor and wanted to borrow it.
(**) More likely, many of them start off with at worst a neutral attitude toward organized labour, but are compelled into an anti-union position due to the politics of industrial projects vs. ecology.
Under his leadership the Labour Party expanded to 500,000 members - so I don’t think that is entirely true.
I think his ideas came as a breath of fresh air to a lot of people, which is why he was elected twice as Labour leader and saw 3 million more people vote Labour in 2017 than 2015, increasing the share of the vote by almost 10 points. What he lack(s/ed) is party management skill and associated ruthlessness. That was exacerbated by the extent to which the right of the party controlled internal processes, but a more savvy and determined leader could have dealt with that. In many ways Starmer is the opposite - without ideas or the ability to inspire but able to exert total control over the party machinery and a ruthlessness bordering on viciousness.
I think it's a good thing that Corbyn will likely not be "in charge" of any new party, but I suspect that it will still struggle with message discipline and party management, particularly under the inevitable onslaught of antisemitism allegations.
It won’t split the left wing vote, because it will be the only left wing option available. As for the effect it might have on Reform’s chances, selling out left wing principles in order to keep Farage out of government is how we got the current bunch of Tories in red rosettes. Voting for a lesser evil means you still end up with evil - why do that when you can vote for an actual good? You’ll never get a government of the left if you always vote for the centre right because of your fear of the far right.
The association with well-known names (principally Jeremy Corbyn, but Zarah Sultana is also well known in Socialist circles, even if she isn't quite the household name of Corbyn) will probably give the new party a significant boost over the existing small Socialist parties.
It sounds like the Canadian Greens are sort of similar to the US Greens? The Greens in England and Wales (Scottish Greens are separate, and the Irish Greens cover both NI and the Republic of Ireland) are more centrist as a whole than other European Greens but not anything like the US Greens - for a start, the English and Welsh Greens put a lot of emphasis on standing for local council seats etc and local representation.
If someone has full use of their faculties and is capable of doing their job, why install an arbitrary age limit rather than basing it on their capabilities? He is a very popular local MP who still does plenty of constitiuency work. Trump is very clearly not capable of doing his job, but that's not because he's a certain age.
True up to a point - though they have the same issue as the English and Welsh Greens (and Reform) that they have historically had a lot of protest voters as well as committed members, so there are more ‘greens’ voting for them than ‘Greens’ who agree with a lot of the manifesto. Some of the actions in the recent coalition government don’t look very progressive - even allowing for the ‘junior partner’ excuse.
Scotland also has the SNP (and now Alba) to draw in those of the Brigadoon With Knuckledusters fringe who are capable of making an X on a piece of paper, alongside both parties’ mass of totally normal decent voters.
My experience is actually (as someone that oscillates between the Lib Dems and the Greens) that a lot (anecdata) of Green voters round me think they’re voting for an ‘environmentalism-focused version of the Lib Dems’ but they really aren’t.
Essentially this is the protest voters.
Probably some policy overlaps, and the same tendency to attract free-floating weirdos, but...
a) ...within the internal positioning of American spectrum, I think the US Greens occupy a space more widely recognized as on the left relative to the major parties. Whereas it's more ambiguous where you'd put the Canadian Greens(I don't think they're universally viewed as left of the socialist NDP, see eg. @Sober Preacher's Kid's "Tofu Tories" for an alternate interpretation), and...
b) ...the Canadian Greens don't seem nearly as linked with pro-"Eurasian" politics as the American ones. To my knowledge, they've never had a leadership debate sponsored by Russia Today, for example.
Never seen Brigadoon, but I think I get the general gist of it, and I gather Knuckledusters are brass knuckles. So is your phrase something like "Hee Haw with Smith and Wessons" in an American context?
@betjemaniac I agree wrt what people think they are voting for with the English Greens vs what they are actually voting for.
Although the current Labour leadership need Reform to be credible, after all:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/03/what-will-labour-do-next-local-elections-reform-uk-left-right
"“We won the large majority at the last election essentially based on a split on the right. At the moment that split is disappearing because so many Tories are going to Reform,” one cabinet source said.
“If we lose voters to Reform ourselves as well, that’s a lot of seats we will lose. If the next election is versus a Farage-Jenrick coalition then we can squeeze the progressive vote very hard. The choice in front of people will be very stark.”
This is part of the counterargument in favour of a focus on Reform which is being put forward by some in No 10 and the Treasury"